Tag Archives: writing

Googling a bit produced some folks more concerned with the neologisms not being in the dictionary rather than the fact they are already being used in the wild. And not just with the kids — witness the social buttons on muyinteresante.es:

The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.

We’ll have to see if twittear and textear wind up in the DRAE at some point. Ya veremos.

As mentioned by KCRW’s Rachel Reynolds on Twitter today, the song “You Are My Sunshine” is in actuality not the happy sing-along it seems at first glance, but instead a heartbreaking, Depression-era, “unbearably sad song” of lost love. This makes it doubly ironic that it has been repurposed for everything from the state song of Louisiana to mustard commercials, with few remembering its true nature.

Here’s the first verse, which is rarely sung. It sets the tone for the whole song:

The other night, dear,
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms.
When I awoke, dear,
I was mistaken
And I hung my head and cried.

So when the plaintive “You are my sunshine / My only sunshine” is sung next, there is sorrow being expressed.

You are my sunshine,
My only sunshine.
You make me happy
When skies are grey.
You’ll never know, dear,
How much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.

Raymond Chandler relished finding names for his quirky characters, including Philip Marlowe, the pipe-smoking, chess-playing private eye — a literary kinsman to Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s solitary sleuth — whom I first met in the pages of fiction as a teenager and whom I have known more than fifty years. Sometimes the names are dead giveaways about the morality or immorality of the character, sometimes they’re opaque, but I’ve always found them intriguing and an open invitation to try to solve the mystery myself.